Japan possesses a rich history of adapting objects and practices originating in the West. As an importer and exporter of cultural products, as well, the country plays an important role in the transnational flow of popular cultural forms of expression. In Japan, particularly theme parks convey an image of the West that can be aesthetically and atmospherically consumed. In the wake of the so-called “bubble economy” of the 1980s alone, 41 new theme parks were created, many of them conceived as “foreign villages” replicating in detail European regionalisms and vividly relocating site-specific qualities, from the Austrian Alpine village to the reconstruction of Stratford-Upon-Avon.
One of these projects is Huis Ten Bosch on the island of Hario-jima in Omura Bay. 400,000 trees and 300,000 flowers were planted here on 154 hectares, and six kilometres of canals were laid out to lend the Japanese coastal landscape the appearance of the Dutch inland. Following the Dutch model, the Japanese theme parks were built on new land accretions. The design of Huis Ten Bosch traces the development of Dutch cities from the 11th to the 20th century, synthesised to an homogenous whole. From the fishing village to the windmill, the church steeple of Utrecht to the royal residency, all components of Dutch culture are present in diverse forms of “architainment”, the replica-like imitation of existing architectures mixed with elements of entertainment. With its own water conditioning facility and a self-contained ecosystem, however, the experience park also proves to be a modern, Japanese-style artwork of engineering. Overall, Huis Ten Bosch thus appears as an atopical space with fictitious locational qualities, present in a material way but without directly relating to the locality and region. The fact that there seems to be less need for legitimising such fakes in Asia than in Europe certainly contributes to the success of this 2.5-billion-euro project.
Nevertheless, the allegation of an increasing “Disneyfication” in Asia is only partially correct. The Japanese enthusiasm for theme parks has as much to do with general cultural globalisation as it does with the domestication of the exotic, which is translated into familiar patterns of national and local culture. The area in which Huis Ten Bosch was erected is on Dejima, an artificial island in the Bay of Nagasaki that from 1641 to 1853 was a Dutch foreign trade post. During the period of national isolation, only the Dutch were allowed to conduct trade with Japan; as the only window to the Western world, Dejima played an accordingly vital role in the native modernisation process. The island, which today again accommodates an exterritorial Dutch town, has in this respect already been a traditional Western enclave for a long time, whose potential in regard to difference for one’s own culture is reactivated. Precisely because diversity is produced there, the theme park, as a generative form scheme, allows the staged foreignness to become part of everyday life.

Sunah Choi, who with projects such as “Learning Asia” has already plumbed the relationship between Europe and Asia with its reciprocal projections, documents with numerous photographs the topography of Huis ten Bosch. Difficulties having to do with cultural transmission, which in times of globalisation appear as nothing more than disruptive factors, appear successfully eliminated in her shots of the experience park – the landscape scenery, which is accurate in every detail, appears convincing, its embedment in the native culture seems perfect at first glance. Upon taking a closer look, however, the tulip fields, the narrow small-town streets, and the historical monuments turn out to be photo-montages transferred into space, rather than the replica of a real European town. The scale appears enlarged, when traditional Japanese architecture meets Dutch representational architecture. The street scenes have a picturesque but sterile effect. Everything is a bit too colourful, appears a bit too staged. The intention does not seem to lie in comparing the real location with its fictitious reconstruction, but rather in evoking a place already imagined in cultural memory, a place revealing itself as a composite of various images typical of the country. Indeed, Huis Ten Bosch primarily functions on a visual level in the sense of a naturalistic display, compensating the absence of real difference in the form of foreign inhabitants with reconstructions accurate in every detail. In this respect, precisely what appears so very real turns out to be a functioning hybrid, rendering the exotic foreignness consumable as an Asian appropriation.
But Sunah Choi does not leave it at recording in a documentary manner such popular culturally over-ornate designs as Huis Ten Bosch. The Japanese conception of what counts as typical Dutch mainly relates to the visible scenery. Hidden beneath it is a high-tech machinery providing for the perfect functioning of the built romanticisms. This discrepancy between traditional appearance and highly modern implementation, however, is only a seeming one. In reality, it marks the core of the Japanese strategy of appropriation, which raises the juxtaposition of tradition and progress to something like a cultural leitmotif.
Sunah Choi therefore programmatically presents her photographs in a layout taken from a brochure on the Japanese Ruler’s Palace in Tokyo. The sizes of the photos of Huis Ten Bosch are adjusted to those of the Imperial Palace, and the text is also placed on those pages on which the text of the brochure, which is conceived for tourists, can be read. Even though the different views of the Imperial Palace appear quite traditional, this building is also a cultural hybrid. The original palace was erected as a wooden structure in 1888. The plans for a new palace on the same site were drawn up in 1964, and in 1968 its construction was completed. This new palace, an iron-and-steel structure corresponding with the modernist style of the times, has both an underground car park and independent electric power supply, whereas its exterior appearance is a perfect synthesis of traditional architecture and the subtle adaptation of modernist architectural visions of glass and steel. This is associated with a notion of tradition that does not adhere to it in a mere conservational manner, but modernises it while at the same time maintaining formal principles. The fact that modernisation consists in adapting and transforming predominantly Western innovations does not contradict the idea of what is authentically Japanese and is mirrored in representative buildings embodying the national spirit, such as the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The mixture of different cultural styles and traditions is not the feature of an homogenising globalisation avant la lettre here, but the epitome of a culture that grasps history as a dynamic concept. In Sunah Choi’s photographs, the Japanese view of Europe manifesting itself in experience parks like Huis Ten Bosch becomes a distanced gaze influenced by Europe, which ultimately visualises difference as the appropriation of foreignness to constitute the own.

Vanessa Joan Müller

The text of Vanessa Joan Müller was written for the publication
Sunah Choi
The Imperial Palace, 2004